High On Arrival (11 page)

10

The times when I was on vacation from
One Day at a Time
float to the top of my memories, the same way that for most people the details of summer jobs prevail over the day-to-day of high school math class. When
One Day at a Time
was on hiatus from its second season and I was seventeen, I spent a couple months in New York. Dad’s apartment was a bold display of unrepentant drug use, a horror show. There were drug dealers coming and going day and night. The once-beautiful apartment had quickly turned into a slum. Papers, clothes, unfinished projects, food, trash—if something got put down on any surface, there it remained indefinitely. Dad and Gen had a double-sided adjustable bed. When it got stuck with one side down flat and the other side raised like a hospital bed, with the head up high and a bend for someone’s knees, it remained that way, a disjointed symbol of their out-of-kilter life until they moved.

The apartment had a spiral staircase to the second floor, a cruel joke to play on heroin addicts. They fell down the stairs constantly. There was blood on the walls and needles on the floor. AIDS wasn’t a fear yet, but junkies still liked to use new needles. Clean, new needles have sharp points, and sharp points are better for finding veins. And if you’re using a new needle every time, and if you shoot up every twenty minutes, and if there are two or three of you, then you use up to 150 needles a day. You don’t throw them away, because where are you going to throw away that many needles without attracting attention or feeling paranoid that you might? The needles accumulate quickly. You had to watch where you stepped in that apartment.

On one of the first days of my visit, I came into the apartment and found my six-year-old brother, Tam, alone. He was sitting on a windowsill using a syringe for a squirt gun.

My father made no secret of his heroin use. One time I knocked on his door to see if he was ready to go out and he said, “Not now, darling. Daddy’s shooting up.” He loved to tell that story. Dad was so fucked up. It was the junkie routine: sleeping for days, shooting up for days, spending time in closets, stumbling around—mundane on paper but painful to watch.

I was horrified at the scene I’d come upon. Richard, one of my friends in L.A., claimed to have invented freebasing— smoking cocaine in its base form—though it’s likely that what he meant was that he introduced a whole bunch of people to the process. A dubious claim to fame. When I told him how worried I was about Dad, Richard suggested that we introduce him to freebase. I guess he thought that once someone did base they wouldn’t need heroin. For some reason I bought that logic—I guess I was desperate for an answer, and cocaine, unlike heroin, was the devil I knew—so I flew Richard into New York to make freebase for Dad. Then Dad became a freebase head.

Dad wasn’t alone: I had started using coke regularly too, though I never shot up—until I did. I carried around a vial of cocaine in my pocket as casually as if it were a pack of cigarettes. I often tried to mooch drugs off my father. Sometimes he complied, sometimes he said no. Did he think they were bad for me or was he concerned about his supply? My best guess is the latter. One night my friend Rae-Dawn Chong—Tommy Chong’s daughter, who would later appear in
Quest for Fire, The Color Purple,
and many other movies—and I were going to Tavern on the Green, the famous restaurant in Central Park, for dinner. Before we left I found Dad asleep on the knees-up side of the broken bed. Excellent—when he was half asleep was always a good time to ask Dad for drugs. He mumbled, “Bindles on the bedside table.” I grabbed one and we left.

Rae-Dawn and I were in a cab speeding through Central Park. We slid the partition between us and the driver closed, huddled on the floor of the cab, and snorted the coke. By the time we got to Tavern on the Green we knew something was terribly wrong. We were nodding out, running to the bathroom to throw up, knocking things over. We were both recognizable, both very young, and both accustomed to snorting shitloads of cocaine. But what we had snorted was definitely not cocaine. This was heroin. We were seriously fucked up. In fucking Tavern on the Green. It was a bad, bad scene. It wasn’t long before we were asked to leave. And I don’t remember anything after that.

I was concerned about Dad, but I wasn’t worried about myself. I told myself that it was the needles that were the problem, though now I see that helping Dad, wanting to save Dad, was another way of avoiding my own issues.

In mid-July there was a blackout in New York. Rosie called Dad in a panic. “Where is she? Put her on the phone.” My father couldn’t find me anywhere. Hours passed with no word from me. Rosie kept calling, frantic with worry. Maybe I was stuck in an elevator somewhere. Maybe someone had abducted me! Dad called around, but nobody had seen me. The blackout ended after a day, but there was still no sign of me.

The next day I came out of the back bedroom, yawning. Dad and Gen ran to me, checking to see if I was okay and asking where I’d been for two days. I said, “I was asleep. Back there.” I gestured toward the back bedroom of my father’s apartment. I’d been right there in the apartment the whole time. I missed the whole blackout. Blacked out.

The drugs that had for so long set the scene for my family’s festive, extravagant lifestyle were moving into a lead role. Drug use was no longer recreational. It was central. It was necessary. We were all in deep and it was starting to show. Genevieve, Jeffrey, and I were all entwined with the same lover—cocaine. It was a complicated relationship, an endless cycle of give and take, the instant thrill and surge of ecstasy that cocaine promised, delivered, and revoked all in the course of half an hour— after which the race to recapture that unimaginably good feeling, which only cocaine could offer, and did, would begin, again and again, until the supply ran out and the thrill turned to a dark, hollow absence, a bleakness so opposite and dreadful that more cocaine wasn’t just desirable, it was necessary.

That necessity became a driving force in the household. There were no boundaries whatsoever. My dad stole a bunch of money from me that summer. When I first came back to New York, Dad had taken me to get a thousand dollars’ worth of American Express traveler’s checks. You’re supposed to sign them twice—once when you buy them and once when you sign them over to the person you want to pay. But my father had me sign all of them twice. He was the kind of person who made you feel like an idiot if you contradicted him—I never did. I just double-signed the checks. But I was no dummy. I knew what he was about, so I slept with my purse clutched under my arm. I woke up one morning and the checks were gone.

If I had any coke, Gen would swoop past, grab it, and disappear. Dad would chant, “Genevieve’s a coke junkie, Genevieve’s a coke junkie,” but the playground taunting belied the escalating insanity. When you use coke intensely you go into cocaine psychosis, you start thinking there are things on you—bugs or threads or strings. Right after you shoot up you notice that something is on you, and you absolutely believe it’s there. It’s so real that no matter how many times you’ve come down off coke and realized it was a hallucination, no matter how many times you’ve talked to other cokeheads about it, read about it, written yourself notes to remind yourself not to believe the illusion, when it happens again you are convinced that no matter what went before, this time it is absolutely real. People tear themselves apart trying to free themselves from those imagined creepy-crawlies.

Dad and Gen both went deep into a coke-bug obsession. I came home after being on a several-day tear with crazy people. Dad said, “I’ve got to talk to you. It’s very important.” He led me to the library and sat down behind his desk. I was thinking,
Here comes the key to life.
But he leaned toward me conspiratorially and said, “I found out where they’re coming from. My nose.” He was talking about the coke bugs. Dad must have liked the expression of confusion and disappointment on my face because a few days later he sat me down in a similarly serious way and said, “I have something very important to tell you and I want you to remember this always. Fifth Avenue separates the East and West sides of Manhattan.” Another time he sat me down for this weighty revelation: “The farther off from England, the closer is to France.” Each time he did this I was really expecting something redemptive and life changing, the
I love you and I’m sorry
moment that should have been forthcoming. But eventually it dawned on me that he was just amusing himself.

So Dad made the historical discovery that coke bugs were coming from his nose, and he was a man of action. I went about my business, and the next time I came home, as God is my witness, I came into the apartment to find my father, naked but wrapped from head to toe in Saran Wrap. He had left slits for his mouth and nose. I was sixteen, and for all the unorthodox parenting I’d experienced, I wasn’t in the habit of seeing my father naked, and I expected to keep it that way. I said, “What are you doing?”

Dad said, “I’m killing the bugs. They can’t breathe.” Okay …

I was happy to be back in L.A., back at
One Day at a Time,
back with Rosie, Patty, and Nancy. One night soon after I came home, my cousins, Rosie, and I were sitting around cooking dinner. We had an ongoing fixation with artichokes. We’d already made our favorite dip: Miracle Whip mixed with Spike (a spice mixture), and there were four artichokes steaming in the pressure cooker. The den of that house in Beachwood Canyon was classic seventies. There was a built-in bench bordering the TV area.
Bench
doesn’t quite do it justice—it was so deep that if you sat with your back against the wall, your feet didn’t reach the edge of the seat. There were cushions that made it loungy, and the whole thing was covered in brown shag carpet that spilled over its edge, down to and across the floor.

We relaxed on that comfortable built-in, drinking wine while the artichokes cooked. Then, all of a sudden, the top of the pressure cooker blew off. It narrowly missed decapitating Rosie. Artichoke went everywhere—the crew on
One Day at a Time
couldn’t have planned an exploding artichoke scene better. The four of us rolled on the floor, clutching our bellies, we were laughing so hard. When we finally pulled ourselves together, we spent the next two hours picking artichoke out of every inch of that brown shag carpet. It was a mess, but it felt like good, clean fun.

I loved living with my aunt and cousins, but I was almost eighteen and ready to live on my own. My manager, Pat McQueeney, found a beautiful house in Laurel Canyon for me to buy. It was a small house with a galley kitchen, but it had great big windows, a terraced backyard, and an amazing view of L.A. Pat and I went shopping for fabrics and carpeting, and our purchases reflected a compromise between Pat’s elegant sensibility and my thrift-store chic vibe. I chose carpeting in hunter green, a color I’ve always loved, and Pat selected custom drapes to match the custom bedspread and shams.

My cousin Patty and I ventured to an auction to buy chairs for my living room. I’d never been to an auction before, but I’d seen a photo of these dwarf wing chairs covered in a Missoni-inspired knit fabric that had subdued green tones matching my carpet. At the auction, I was so nervous to bid that I kept shoving the cards with the numbers on them to Patty so that she could bid for me. Finally, she summoned the courage to win me my chairs. We put them on either side of the living room fire-place.

Just before my birthday, Rosie moved out of Beachwood to a place in Venice where she would live for the rest of her life. Patty went to live with her boyfriend Brad, and Nancy got her own place. Before we all dispersed, we had a crazy Say Good-bye to Beachwood party that did my father proud. There were people running through the hills on acid, chasing coyotes. And then I turned eighteen.

I celebrated my eighteenth birthday in a private room upstairs at a posh Beverly Hills restaurant called Bistro Gardens. The pictures of me from that party show me wearing a backless black jersey dress and blowing out my candles. I danced with John Travolta, who was wearing a white suit. I was young and happy, beautiful and carefree. But I was about to get my first wake-up call.

A week after my eighteenth birthday I was out with my dad’s old friend Yipi. He would later date and live with my mother, but now I was hanging out with him. I had taken some ludes and now we were going clubbing.

We were driving up Robertson Boulevard when Yipi pulled over to pick something up at a club. I stayed in the car. But then, for reasons that clouded over before they were ever clear, I got out of the car. I was incoherently wasted, which wasn’t a daily state for me. I mean, I could usually go clubbing on ludes, but this time it wasn’t to be. I seem to remember flagging down the police because someone was bugging me. But then—as you sometimes do on ludes—I kind of crumpled. I just slid to the ground like a marionette whose strings had been severed. By the time Yipi came back to the car, the police were standing over me, a sorry heap of youth on the sidewalk.

The cops said to Yipi, “Do you know this woman?”

Yipi said, “Yes, this is Mackenzie Phillips, the TV star. I’ll take care of her.” According to Yipi, when he said my name a light went on in the cops’ eyes. They promptly arrested me and took me away.